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I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a Netflix original ghost story that haunts more with its quiet beauty than with fear. It’s a love letter to the lyrically chilling Shirley Jackson and a study on the lonely emptiness of ghosts unable to move past the shock of death. We use ghosts to scare ourselves, to play on what we fear may be lurking in the shadows, to explain the memories of the dead that weave… Read more »

The monster in Kubo and the Two Strings is a toxic family. It feels like a very personal story wrapped in a beautiful allegory, a tool to deal with some harsh realities many people struggle with as they make their way into the world.

From the film to the two TV seasons, all iterations of Fargo seem to hint at an existentially absurdist perspective, a viewpoint that held keep the abstract idea of Fargo cohesive. Fargo‘s second television season, however, expertly demonstrates what absurdism means.

Emma Donoghue’s Room begins as a story about how a young child processes a confined world when it’s all he’s ever known, but it becomes a story about how his mother tries to cope with her frayed and exploded existence.

The general understanding of Murphy’s Law is, “Anything that can go wrong will.” We say this anytime anything sucks, like some mantra of pessimism. When Interstellar‘s Murph Cooper asks her dad why she was named after something bad, he explains with the original wording of Murphy’s Law, a version of “Whatever can happen, will happen.” This is the key to the entire film, plot holes and all.

A large portion of the common stale well of advice we dip into and serve up to each other is to forsake regret. Contemplating untaken paths and unsnatched opportunities can leave us forlorn and stuck; staring endlessly into the limitless alternate worlds our imagination brews up for us. But these “might-have-been” world don’t actually exist, and getting distracted by them can take the color out of this life we have now. The Land of Regret is surely no place to reside, but does that mean we should abandon regret altogether?

The “Boy with Apple” painting from Wes Anderson’s latest candy-coated dream “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a character in of itself. Is this a centuries old painting, or what it commissioned for the movie?